"The basic building blocks of life are identical in all species."
Country" in high school; soon he was
a leading campus petitioner on behalf
of divestment from the South African
government. He studied economics
and wrote for the college newspaper.
At the time, Warith Deen Moham-
med was a prominent political figure.
He had taken over the Nation of Islam
after the death of his father, Elijah Mu-
hammad, and had steered its member-
ship away from racial separatism and
toward mainstream Sunni Islam, chang-
ing the organization's name to the
American Society of Muslims. Under
his influence, Ellison, who had been a
mostly non-observant Catholic, con-
verted, at the age of nineteen.
In , Ellison married Kim Dore,
whom he'd met in high school---they
divorced in ---and enrolled at the
University of Minnesota's law school,
where, along with other students of
color, he protested against the lack of
diversity in the school's faculty and
sta . On a walk around campus, he and
Kim noticed a scrawl of racist gra ti
on a pedestrian bridge. Ellison con-
tacted the law school's black students
and the university's Progressive Stu-
dents Association and organized an
e ort to paint over the gra ti. One
student was arrested on painting day,
and Ellison called the local newspa-
pers to let them know what had hap-
pened. In , following an incident
in Minneapolis, Ellison organized pro-
tests against police brutality. After grad-
uation, he took a job at a law firm, then
became the executive director of the
Legal Rights Center in Minneapolis.
In the summer of , Ellison met
Paul Wellstone, the Minnesota sena-
tor who died in a plane crash in .
Wellstone is a key figure in Minneso-
ta's long liberal tradition; while I was
there, everyone I spoke to invoked him.
"He really changed my idea of what a
politician could be," Ellison said, his
face brightening. " 'Cause he was a very
unpolitical politician, right? I mean,
this guy would come down to commu-
nity events, he was present---he really
kind of set the template for what most
Minnesota politicians want to be."
Wellstone believed that political change
depended on good policy, grass-roots
organizing, and electoral victories. "You
need all three," Ellison said. "At the
end of the day, if all we ever had was
Bloody Sunday, and the Edmund Pet-
tus Bridge, but we weren't talking about
the Voting Rights Act, people's lives
would not have changed much."
Ellison ran for the state legislature
in , and lost, but in he ran
again and won, just weeks after Well-
stone's death. In , he was elected
to the U.S. House of Representatives.
In that election, his district, which is
nearly two-thirds white, had the low-
est turnout in the state; in Ellison's re-
cent reëlection, it had the highest. The
work of organizing, Ellison told me,
"isn't just about winning elections. It's
about building community. It's a way
for neighbors to talk about stu , when
neighbors don't usually talk." Ellison
is not a policy wonk; he talks about
such imperatives as "raising the mini-
mum wage, putting money into the
schools, staving o environmental di-
saster" in long, rolling clusters, and often
ends by declaiming the point of the
whole thing: "Just improving the qual-
ity of people's lives!"
He frequently uses the word "soli-
darity," attempting to eschew the de-
bates over identity politics that have
proliferated since the Presidential elec-
tion. In a widely read Times Op-Ed,
the liberal political theorist Mark Lilla
wrote that Hillary Clinton tended,
especially when discussing domestic
a airs, to "slip into the rhetoric of di-
versity, calling out explicitly to African-
American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women
voters at every stop." By presenting the
image of America as a collection of
categories, Lilla argued, Democrats had
encouraged working-class whites to do
the same, and to vote as a bloc for
Trump. Former Vice-President Joe
Biden made a similar point both during
and after the campaign, saying that the
Democrats had not shown white work-
ing-class voters "enough respect." Con-
versely, Sally Boynton Brown, one of
the candidates for the chairmanship,
who is white, made headlines when she
said, at a Party forum, that the D.N.C.
needs to teach volunteers "how to be
sensitive and how to shut their mouths
if they are white."
Ellison o ers an idealistic synthesis,
drawing on Wellstone's approach---
which bears some resemblance to Mar-
tin Luther King, Jr.,'s Beloved Commu-
nity, a semi-utopian vision that insisted
on the inextricability of economic jus-
tice, civil rights, and antiwar sentiment.
Ellison's advantage in promulgating this
sixties-descended, peace-and-love brand
of liberalism is, perhaps, the matter
of his own identity: no one is likely to
accuse a black Muslim who fought his
first political battles over apartheid
and police brutality of shunting the